Blog Response V: Pedro Almodóvar's "Bad Education"

Please read the document linked to below, as well the blog post that follows, and answer the questions posed to you in the comments.

Almodóvar on "Bad Education" and "Talk to Her"

Bad Education clearly announces its Hitchcockian roots from the very beginning: with a heavily Saul Bass-influenced title sequence over which plays a piece of music in the style of Hitchcock's most well-known soundtrack composer, Bernard Hermann:

Like Vertigo in particular, Bad Education self-consciously evokes the tropes of film noir: it centers around a story of crime and betrayal in which we are led to sympathize with the wrongdoers, and employs the figure of the femme fatale while at the same time re-interpreting this figure in bold new ways. Indeed, Almodóvar's film - as might be expected from a film made almost 60 years after the heyday of classic film noir - plays the noir formulas in far more radical ways than even Hitchcock was likely to have imagined. However, on reflection, much of what it accomplishes can be understood as only heightening the ways in which Hitchcock used the conventions of film noir to explore themes like feminine identity and obsessive sexual desire.

Blog Response IV: Luis Buñuel's "That Obscure Object of Desire"

Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel began his career collaborating with surrealist painter Salvador Dalí on the 16 minute short film Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1928) - what Roger Ebert once called "the most famous short film ever made":

Un Chien Andalou established many of the hallmarks of Buñuel's film career. First, there are the influences of surrealism. Using a series of images that mischievously flout the conventions of realistic storytelling, Buñuel created a cinematic equivalent of the surrealist practices of 'automatic writing' and 'automatic drawing', in which one begins writing or drawing without any plan, letting the words or lines simply flow out. One of the aesthetic effects of this practice was what the 19th century writer Comte de Lautréamont once described as "the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella", or what painter Max Ernst called "a linking of two realities that by all appearances have nothing to link them, in a setting that by all appearances does not fit them." By juxtaposing things, situations, people, and events in seemingly random ways, the surrealists were able to create a unique combination of horror and hilarious absurdity that they often described on an analogy with the imagery found in dreams.